Steely Harbour

The opening. Excerpt.

Call him Jack. Out of the wilderness Jack, sailor in the eggshell sky Jack, fabulous Jack, terrible Jack, drifting through this memory of a world in a fantastic dirigible, a great bladder of rust red hanging impossibly above a brown desert, driven by the great lines of the flux like a tiny silver fish in a raging cataract.

Fair and stalwart Jack, in his leathers and denim, smiling and wild with dirty straw-blond hair. Riding above the desert with the sun in his grey eyes. His airship high in a thermal, hot wind on his face, he leans over the gondola balcony and bolts an enamelled telescope to the rail. There is sand on the boards and his bare feet make tiny gritty noises, but otherwise there is only the clink of the telescope on the rail and the deep silence of the wind. Below, many hundreds of feet below, stretches the brown desert. At this height it is almost like chocolate and caramel and swirls of thick milk, but Jack knows the desert is baked brown rock and coarse sand and the white is not milk but great curved banks and drifts of dry, brittle salt. The reminder of rivers and lakes in this memory of a world.

Yet in the east there is a glimmer, a suggestion of some change in this changeless place, a hint of cliffs and pounding waves and long white beaches, for at last Jack has come to the ocean. He bends and peers through the enamelled telescope, examining the curls and coves of the coastline, looking for a place legend tells him must still be there, waiting. He has travelled across ten thousand miles of wasteland dotted with the starving settlements of a few last desperate people, and all the signs have been there. The hunted look in the eyes. The children hanging listlessly from cradle and hammock, besieged by flies. The grinding poverty. Jack brought the people what peace and rest he could, but there was only so much he could do. For the last ten thousand miles, the signs of a beast have been on the dying land. What little life the old country still possesses has been sucked out, as surely as a kiter will suck on a man’s blood until he is nothing but a curled husk, blowing and tumbling in the wind, nightmares for the thin children. There is a beast in this place, and Jack has tracked it down.

He turns his telescope to the north, along the coastline, and there, at the head of an impossibly long beach, near the dry mouth of a dead river, built on a great plateau of salt and crusted alkali mud, the city waits. Jack chuckles to himself; a city indeed. He saw a proper city once, in his youth, and this is nothing but a provincial town by comparison. But it is the largest settlement in this memory of a world; the lines of flux blew the land clean and then the beasts came and the desert followed soon after. This place is the last significant sign of a race who once dominated this world like the beasts dominate it now.

But no, Jack smiles his broad and sunny smile, the beasts no longer dominate, the beasts no longer rule, the beasts are all dead, at Jack’s hand. All but one. And in Steely Harbour, the last city, Jack believes he has at last found it. The last beast.

Through the telescope, Jack can see a cluster of ragged buildings balanced on the alkali flat, grouped tightly around the few remaining wells. The pump heads loom over the houses and hovels like the picked skeletons of crucified men, and windmills turn slowly as the flux swirls and eddies around this little haven. Jack sniffs the wind, and knows there must be an enormous deposit of some ferrous or magnetic material below the alkali flat, so Steely Harbour has been protected from the cleansing current of the flux for hundreds of years. They may even have prospered, but the beast arrived out of the deep hot ocean at some indeterminable point ten years ago or more, and now, like all the country for thousands of miles, the town is being sucked dry, dry as the desert, white as the salt.

But the lodestone. This is a great thing indeed.

Jack unbolts the telescope and turns the airship toward Steely Harbour. On the rounded prow of his vessel, a great yellow eye has been painted. It stares ahead, seeking out the beasts, nullifying their sweet and terrible song, turning aside the lines of the flux and protecting him from its cleansing wind. Strings dangle from the gondola, knotted into intricate shapes. These are Jack’s feints and fancies, and they protect him from the wild kiters and bladderwrack and other, stranger things that have come to fill the spaces left by humans in this memory of a world. The sky is a pale pink, full of dust. A man with the right kind of eyes can look out into the sky, hold his hand against the sun, and read the flux, watch it turn and twist and climb and dive, and so follow in its wake and watch the devastation, the clean quiet devastation it brings. Jack has the right kind of eyes.

The wind blows. The airship sails. The sea draws near.